I just watched the CERN conference webcast. From what I understood, the Atlas experiment, presented by speaker Fabiola Gianotti, has evidence of a Higgs boson at about 124.5 GeV but the CMS experiment, presented by Guido Tonelli, who incidentally has just lost his father, is still dubious about it. I am waiting for confirmation of my impression by my CERN friends at Test4Theory@home.
Tullio

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I just watched the CERN conference webcast. From what I understood, the Atlas experiment, presented by speaker Fabiola Gianotti, has evidence of a Higgs boson at about 124.5 GeV but the CMS experiment, presented by Guido Tonelli, who incidentally has just lost his father, is still dubious about it. I am waiting for confirmation of my impression by my CERN friends at Test4Theory@home.
Tullio

This is very interesting! Please let us know any confirmation you receive.

Steve

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Warning, addicted to SETI crunching!
Crunching as a member of GPU Users Group.
GPUUG Website

BBC

None of the spikes seen by the experiments is at much more than the "two sigma" level of certainty.

A level of "five sigma" is required to claim a discovery, meaning there is less than a one in a million chance the data spike is down to a statistical fluke.

Prof Stefan Soldner-Rembold, from the University of Manchester, called the quality of the LHC's results "exceptional", adding: "Within one year we will probably know whether the Higgs particle exists, but it is likely not going to be a Christmas present."

The simple fact that both Atlas and CMS seem to be seeing a data spike at the same mass has been enough to cause enormous excitement in the particle physics community.

Near enough but no cigar yet.....

Thank you Chris! I find this facinating!

Steve

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Warning, addicted to SETI crunching!
Crunching as a member of GPU Users Group.
GPUUG Website

The announcement made by CERN confirms nothing! All they said is that they effectively saw a "blip" in their data that might be something. And as well as that, they said its at "2 sigma". Which means that its no where near the 5 sigma needed to confirm something new!!

Listen to me very carefully guys;

There is NO HIGGS BOSON! And no Higgs mechanism! The physicists at CERN are chasing a fictitious particle that simply does not exist!

Like i said before, God told me!

John.

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It was at 3 sigma which is sufficient at 99.7% confidence to accept most all hypotheses and claims. Polls stated for political preference typically have a 95% certainty for the stated margin of error. I am quite sure the Higgs will be confirmed at the 5 sigma level given a little more time. Mitt Romney will bet you $10,000 that this will indeed be true--give him a call.

It is not likely that the last bit of symmetry will not be confirmed when all else has been found.
What was God's grade in graduate level Theoretical Physics ? I think her degree was actually in Meta-Physics.

William, I see you think God to be female. Interesting, because short lived Pope John Paul I said that "God is not only a father, but also a mother", causing great consternation in the Vatican.Johnney, you are not the only one who talks with God. I saw in the first benches of the CERN auditorium the white hairs of professor Antonino Zichichi, a noted Christian believer. I am sure he believes in the existence of the Higgs boson. After listening to two lectures by Italian scientists, one of them a woman, I must say that I am too convinced it exists and I am supporting the MonteCarlo calculations often cited by Fabiola Gianotti with my humble PC and the Test4Theory@home project.
Tullio

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Well Johnny has lost any shred of credibility he may have had with me after his most recent post.

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Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

In a post on theregister.co.uk there is a link to a preprint of the article submitted to Physical Review Letters by the ATLAS cooperation. The list of the institutes involved and the authors is almost as long as the text of the article. This gives an idea of the effort behind it.
Tullio
Edit: it is three times longer. At Bibliography [14] I see the programs running on my PC.

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Even if I look ignorant, I would like to have someone in this Forum that can explain me in a very simple way, why scientists call the Higgs Boson as the "GOD Particle" and what it is in Theory.

Even liking cosmology and Physics, i have to admit that some subjects are to much for my bean counter brain.

Thanks in advance for your clarifications on this subject.

The "God's particle" was the title of a book by a scientist. Not many of them like this title but to sell a book you must make some advertising.From what I know, the Higgs boson is a feature of the Standard Model of elementary particles and is necessary to produce a result without which the Standard Model would be absurd, that is a mass not zero for every particle, except the photon, and, maybe, the neutrino. I don't know if the neutrino is included in the Standard Model. There is a post on theregister.co.uk which tries to explain this in more detail with the help of a physicist. Also the video interviews at the CERN site give good explanations. CERN is trying to explain things to the populace, and some people complain on the CERN blogs about CERN not being scientific enough.
Tullio

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The announcement made by CERN confirms nothing! All they said is that they effectively saw a "blip" in their data that might be something. And as well as that, they said its at "2 sigma". Which means that its no where near the 5 sigma needed to confirm something new!!

Listen to me very carefully guys;

There is NO HIGGS BOSON! And no Higgs mechanism! The physicists at CERN are chasing a fictitious particle that simply does not exist!

Like i said before, God told me!

John.

Sounds like you do too much drugs.

Johnny, have you ever considered asking musicplayer to form a team?

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The Higgs Boson is the force carrier that gives particles their mass. Mass is resistance to acceleration. One recent book that I read describes the effect as follows.

Suppose that the Queen of England enters a long room at one door and tries to cross the room and exit at a door at the other end. The room is filled with hundreds of people. Throngs of admiring people gather around the Queen as she moves through the room, impeding her progress.

That is the Higgs effect.

Was it meant for me?

Anyway, a particle is supposed to be a carrier of energy. Still it is regarded as being a particle.

It typically has mass and likely also a charge.

Also the source behind radiation is supposed to be particles having different physical properties.

Do we think of radiation as being energy or as being particles? Possibly the state of a particle (energy more than charge, perhaps) depends on the speed od the particle or something else.

But a particle at high speed also carries a lot of energy. I know there are two types of energy out there, but by just surfing I am unable to get the difference that I know exist between these two things. One of them may me call kinetic energy or something like that. I do not have the other one. If you have physics knowledge, you may perhaps explain this to me.

A particle being in one type or kind of state could perhaps be detected while in that type of kind or state. But it could perhaps exist in one or more other different kinds or types of state (possibly in some kind of energy state or having no mass or charge at all) where it may not be detected.

Could this Higgs Boson particle assume such different physical properties?

Bosons are particles with integer spin which do not obey the Pauli exclusion principle which particles with semi integer spin (fermions) must obey. So they are quanta of energy rather than particles.
Tullio

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Maybe I could return back to the definition of the Planck constant (or better Planck's constant) in order to be able to determine whether or not gravity can be measured as being waves, or it rather could be detected as being particles instead? Or maybe gravity exists in both ways (or states), but presumably not at the same time.

Again, matter vs. energy (matter means particles, energy means particles in motion -> radiation).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_constant

Can you have both states (mass and energy) side by side at the same time?

Charge should not be the main point or culprit, or maybe I am wrong on this point? Can you have energy with different or opposite states? May the same goes with gravity as well, whether or not gravity is created from particles (mass) or rather energy?

We do have something called field propulsion technology, by the way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_propulsion

Gravitational waves should exist according to general relativity, but they are very weak. Einstein@home is processing the data from the USA LIGO interferometers, the GEO600 and VIRGO interferometers in Europe, so far without results. Attempts to quantize the classical gravitational field so far have been unsuccessful. The graviton should be a spin 2 boson, that is the quantum of a tensor field, with mass zero like the photon, which has spin 1.
Tullio

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Bosons and fermions behave as if they were both waves and particles. It means probably that we don't have a "true" grasp on reality and must interpret what we observe in the context of things that we are familiar with.

Bosons and fermions behave as if they were both waves and particles.

They both possess "duality"

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The Kite Fliers

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Kite fliers: An imaginary club of solo members, those who don't yet
belong to a formal team so "fly their own kites" - as the saying goes.